iFixit take the new iPad to bits

The new iPad's display screen has the normally-reserved teardown specialists at iFixit gushing.

The new iPad's display screen has the normally-reserved teardown specialists at iFixit gushing.

The company got its hands on the new Apple tablet after iFixit CXO Luke Soules flew all the way down to Australia to be the first to do a live teardown. And according to Soules, the new iPad's display screen really does live up to the hype.

"Oh goodness! It's so beautiful!" he wrote during the live teardown on iFixit's website. "Even turned off, the 2048x1536 pixel 'Retina Display' seems to radiate with colors one could not begin to imagine."

The new iPad's display screen has been touted as one of the tablet's key improvements, along with Apple's new A5X chipset that features dual-core CPU processing and quad-core GPU processing. During his teardown of the device, Soules said that the model numbers on the back of the 9.7-inch display led him to believe that the new screen is indeed a Samsung LCD, as has been speculated for the past few days in the tech media.

In addition to praising the new display, Souls remarked that the new iPad has an improved 5MP rear-facing camera that "boasts autofocus, face detection, 1080p HD video recording and video stabilization," which represented "a great improvement over last year's 0.7MP camera." On the downside, Soules found that he couldn't test out the new iPad's LTE connectivity since the device does not run on the spectrum bands that Australia has currently allotted for LTE services.

The new iPad, announced by Apple last week, goes on sale in the UK at 8am on Friday and is the first Apple tablet to feature LTE connectivity. Apple has said that demand for the new tablet has been "off the charts" and that it has already sold out of its entire preorder stock. The LTE version of the new device will cost £499 for 16GB of storage, £579 for 32GB of storage and £659 for 64GB of storage.